Previously only available for the iPad, Amazon’s Instant Video app is now ready for download on your iPhone and iPod Touch.

Amazon Prime members now have access to over 30,000 streaming titles on their smaller iOS devices, including hit TV shows like American Horror Story and Downton Abbey. Customers of Amazon Instant Video can now purchase from a library of over 140,000 movies and TV shows from their iPhone and iPod Touch.

The app has added a “Watchlist” feature, which “lets customers make a list of all the movies and TV episodes they want to watch in the future, regardless of whether they own the video or not.”

“Our customers tell us they want the convenience of being able to watch all of their movies and TV episodes, wherever they are,” said Anthony Bay, Amazon.com Vice President for Video. “Today we’re excited to extend our ‘buy once, enjoy everywhere’ approach to iPhone and iPod touch users, giving customers the chance to enjoy more than 140,000 titles from Amazon Instant Video and more than 30,000 titles from Prime Instant Video anytime, anywhere.”

Amazon has also announced a new Cloud Player app for Samsung Smart TVs, making it easier for users to access their music from any location.

“The Amazon Cloud Player app, which can be found in the Samsung Smart Hub, provides customers with the ability to browse, search or playback music from their library directly on their TVs,” says Amazon.

The Amazon Cloud Player has also dropped on Roku The Roku blog details the new features of the app:

“Shuffle play an album, all songs from an artist, all songs within a genre, a playlist or even all songs; Search for any album, artist or song in your account; Enjoy your music collection in high-quality 256 Kbps audio; View song details and album art on a smooth scrolling screensaver; Continue playback while browsing and quickly access the “Now Playing” song through a shortcut”

More ways to access your Amazon content – never a bad thing.

“The new app is simply the best way to watch, create and share Vimeo videos on the go. We redesigned it to be smarter and more intuitive so you can do what you want, when you want, really easily. You can take your feed on a road trip (just not while you’re driving), relax in the park with your Watch Later queue, or catch a Staff Pick or a friend’s video while in line for lunch. When the lunch line explodes into spontaneous song and dance, as it often does, record it and upload it right from the app. You can even watch more videos while it uploads,” says Vimeo.

Uploading has gotten a lot faster with this update, as users can let their videos upload in background while watching other videos or adding information to the upload.

On the browsing side, there’s a new Feed view and a tab-based design that replaces the old grid-style navigation. This makes it much easier to find videos via an Explore tab, or watch videos from your feed, “watch later” queue, or your “likes.” Sharing has also improved, as users can now natively share videos they like via Facebook, Twitter, or email.

Of course, Vimeo says that everything is now “super fast.”

Check out the not-creepy-at-all promotional video Vimeo made for their new iPhone app below:

Recently, Vimeo launched an all-new Creator Services Suite which allowed video creators to add a tip jar to their videos. Also on the horizon over at Vimeo: Pay-to-view videos.

A new mobile analytics firm, Adeven, has just revealed that there are over 400,000 apps on the App Store that have never been downloaded. There are only 676,252 apps available in the app store. That means that over two-thirds of the app store is not even being engaged by consumers. The illusion of anybody making it on the App Store comes crumbling down.

Those 400,000 apps that nobody cares about have been dubbed “zombie apps” by Adeven. So what constitutes a zombie app? They found that all the affected apps have two things in common – they have no ranking and are overlooked by search engines. It creates an ecosystem where only those who can afford to be discovered have any kind of success on the App Store.

Speaking to Gigaom, Adeven CEO Christian Henschel says that Apple’s closed system is to blame for these zombie apps. He says that there is no “proper search” on the App Store so consumers go to the top ranked apps to find new experiences. He also says that apps not in the top 25 lists are going to have a rough time in getting discovered.

It’s not only a problem that strictly affects the App Store. I’ve found the same problem when navigating Google Play. Sure, it’s easier to search for lesser known apps, but you’re still going to rely on the top rankings. Neither store gives consumers much incentive to find lesser known apps, but instead pushes apps from the same few developers.

As for Adeven, their new tools will help developers track the success of their app. Their new software, apptrace, has daily charts that look at the rise and fall of apps on the global and local markets. It’s also interesting that games make up the top 95 apps. Google Chrome and Pinterest are the only non-game apps in the top 100 according to apptrace.

In short, your chances of being discovered on the App Store are slim. Most of the top 300 apps are established games and brands that will not be knocking down anytime soon. That being said, your chances of being discovered are much higher if you make games. They are the most popular type of app and some clever marketing might lead to some discovery.

Twitter has been upgraded to version 4.3 on iOS and 3.3 on Android to bring you, the Tweeters, the latest and greatest innovations in mobile tweet technology. What you will see on display here are the efforts of Twitter’s development team bringing more of the desktop experience to the mobile handsets that dominate more and more of our lives.

First up is an addition that I personally have been wanting for a while now – expanded Tweets. You may have noticed that the desktop version of Twitter allows you to watch YouTube videos linked within Tweets inside the tweet itself. That feature is now available on the mobile app so you don’t have to open a separate app to get to the video, article or image that get Tweeted out.

Search autocomplete has received a revamp that sees more results displayed while you’re searching for that special somebody on Twitter. Search still supports real names and @usernames so you never have to use one or the other to get the results you want.

Humorously enough, Twitter has added a feature that I never knew I wanted until now. The app will now push notifications to your phone whenever somebody in particular Tweets. If you must get every Tweet from your favorite Twitter personality delivered straight to your phone, this is the place to do it. Just turn on push notifications for Tweets on any user profile’s action button and you’re good to go.

As a little added bonus, Twitter for iPhone is getting access to Twitter Events. It’s a super cool feature that allows you to search for something, like say #NASCAR, during an event and you will receive all the major updates live from the event. Considering that Twitter users break the news more often mainstream media, it would be a great idea to use it for events like the Olympics this summer.

You can grab the new Twitter app from both the App Store and Google Play.

As you might expect, users were not at all happy about the problems. What’s more, many – probably most – didn’t realize that the problem was Apple’s fault and not the developers. And so, of course, these users did what users do when they’re upset about something: they left nasty reviews. Several of the affected apps received numerous negative reviews before Apple got their fix in place.

Fortunately, Apple recognizes the amount of harm a whole bunch of negative reviews in a short time can cause, especially to an app that’s struggling to gain popularity in the App Store. With that in mind, Apple extended the affected apps a peace offering. They removed all of the negative reviews left during the period the bug was in effect. In some cases, they even appeared to have removed all reviews, not just the negative ones.

With the bug fixed and most users having installed the new, corrected versions of the apps, removing the negative reviews is pretty much the last step toward fixing the problem. Kudos to Apple for making the situation right.

At the Google I/O Keynote, the totals for both installs and the amount of apps and games available was revealed, and it’s pretty clear Google Play is holding its own against its Apple competition. As you can see from the lead image, Google is boasting 20 billion application installs. Furthermore, there are 600,000 apps and games available at Google Play, compared to Apple’s 650,000. What does this mean besides both companies offer users a lot of ways to augment their phones? Well, aside from the fact that users of either iPhones or Android phones have a lot of choices when it comes to applications they can pick from, it also indicates that Apple and Google are well ahead of the competition regarding being the a consumer favorite.

With the looming collapse of Rim, which makes the BlackBerry devices, perhaps the only platform left to make inroads against the Android/iPhone stranglehold is the Windows Phone. No word on how many apps their store offers, but it’s probably not as many as Google Play or the App Store.

As pointed out by the Verge, considering the fact that Google announced 10 billion downloads at the end of 2011, and they’ve already doubled that in less than a year, how long before Android apps catch up to Apple’s 30-billion-downloads total?

[Lead image courtesy]

“Customers tell us that they want access to all of their music, wherever they are, and on all of the devices they use,” said Steve Boom, vice president of digital music for Amazon. “By bringing Cloud Player to iPhone and iPod touch, we now have the most widely compatible cloud playback solution available, giving our customers the ability to buy once and enjoy their music everywhere.”

The Amazon Cloud Player has already been available on the web and on Android devices, including Amazon’s Kindle Fire mini-tablet, for some time. The Android version of the app can be downloaded through either the Amazon Appstore or Google Play and is called “Amazon MP3 with cloudplayer.” Since all Amazon customers have 5 GB of free Amazon Cloud Drive storage, Apple fans have been asking Amazon for an iOS version of Cloud Player since the app launched. Storage for Cloud Drive can be increased through yearly subscription options that cost around $1 per GB. Customers who purchase one of these increased storage options will, for a limited time, receive unlimited Cloud Drive storage space for MP3 and AAC music files.

The most notable improvement to the app, at least in my nowhere-near-comprehensive first impression, is the directions feature. In virtually every map service, whether its Google Maps, Bing Maps, MapQuest, or whatever, the directions always contain way too much information for certain junctions in your trip. Really, nobody needs to know the state route number and the multiple names of a street – one will suffice. It’s less to juggle around in the head while you’re trying to, y’know, drive an car safely. The new MapQuest app for iPhone remedies that vexing amount of information by giving you one name for your turns/exits and also presents it in a large, easily readable font.

Below is a before-and-after comparison of MapQuest 3.0 and the previous version, both of which display the same step in the same directions. In the new version, which is on the right, it is clearly apparent what street I should be on the lookout for during this trek without muddling my already-divided attention with superfluous transit details.

Another improvement in Mapquest 3.0 is the layout of the menus. As you can see in comparison above, or maybe you just know from using the app yourself, the main menu (where you type in your search or directions) has been consolidated from a full space-consuming menu bar at the bottom of the screen to a single “Menu” button in the lower left-hand corner. Now that the menu has been liberated from the bottom of the screen, you’ll find a few more options in the Menu with 3.0, like live traffic conditions and options to easily clear the map or edit your location/directions.

Where the menu had previously been you will now find a collapsable menu of options to conduct quick searches for places like gas stations, hotels, rest stops, drug stores, theatres, banks and, yes, even ice cream vendors. You can view more than one of these categories at once, so if you really want to find a hotel that is within walking distance to bar, you can choose both of those options to satisfy your every need.

The menu bar at the bottom is also collapsable now so you can see a great area of the map. Oh yeah, and if you didn’t notice in that last example, there’s now a landscape view for MapQuest, too.

Other fun inclusions in this update easy searches for gas prices at nearby stations and an overall better, faster search function when trying to figure out just where the hell you wanna be going.

Apparently, Mitt Romney is your guy if you want a better Amercia.

Yeah, Amercia.

The app, called “With Mitt,” is pretty simple. You snap a photo of someone or something that’s pro-Mitt and overlay one of fourteen Romney slogans on said photo. You are then prompted to share the photo on Facebook and Twitter, and shortly after that you’re asked to donate. The app would have made no news if it weren’t for that one basic error.

Some of the overlays feature slogans like “Day one, job one,” “I’m a mom for Mitt,” “Obama isn’t Working,” I Stand with Mitt,” and “The America we love.” The one that stands out reads “A better Amercia.”

Sure, typos happen. And this one is unlikely to derail his campaign. But it’s pretty damn funny. And the internet has been unsurprisingly unforgiving of the error.

On Twitter, the #Amercia hashtag has been trending since Tuesday evening. Here’s a sampling of what they’re saying:

There’s even a new Tumblr blog dedicated to the typo, called “Amercia is With Mitt,” featuring the internet’s own photo overlay creations:

The app is still available to download as version 1.0, so if you want to have fun with the error act fast before it’s updated.

*Note: I acknowledge that I included at least 1 error in this article to protect myself against the “you had a typo too” claims. That way, I can say it was intentional. Or maybe I didn’t. ‘Mercia.

Despite cringing upon hearing that there could be an entire category called “Tebow apps,” I have to say that I laughed pretty hard while tinkering with the new Dubstep Tebow app from Electric Green. It’s pretty simple, but the amount of possible musical configurations gives it some staying power – that is, of course, if neither Dubstep or Tebow fall from the public’s obsession. If you’ve watched ESPN or read a sports blog lately, you’re probably aware that the latter isn’t going to happen. My 18-year-old brother assures me that the other one won’t happen either.

As of right now, the app features 10 different dubstep beats, which you can enhance with 10 different bass effects. Once you get those going, you can sample one of fifteen Tebow-related sound clips. These include Tebow himself, saying things like “God Bless” and screaming “LET’S GO.” Tebow’s “let’s go” doesn’t feel as powerful as Lil Jon’s, however. Other clips include announcers and commentators, including ESPN’s Skip Bayless with his now-famous “All he does is win” quote.

Possibly the coolest feature comes when you tilt your device. The app will mess with the speed of the bass depending on the level of tilt to produce that “fat bass wobble” that we all love hate know.

The app, available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, will run you $0.99. They promise “bigger and better” updates in the near future.

One reviewer says, “I never thought I’d be making fat beats and listening to Tebow at the same time!”

Me neither, young Tebow fan, me neither.

[Via Gizmodo]